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I am particularly interested in applications of social psychology in the educational arena. I study "the school" as a social context, and investigate how the relations within and outside the school impact academic behaviour, as well as youths' general well-being. So far, I have studied early school drop out issues, school belonging and social identity threat of low SES high school students. I am also part of a team developing and evaluating a school based development program for 5th graders.

My other research areas concern volunteerism, use of technology in the social life and culture.

In terms of volunteerism, I am especially interested in what gets an individual, especially a young adult, to start and endure in volunteering. The positive effects of volunteerism on the targets and the general society are evident in the literature. Research also notes that volunteers, themselves benefit greatly from this experience. Yet, there is a group of young people, who don’t choose to volunteer, because of various reasons, one of which is being lack of confidence. In my research, I am interested in finding out ways to encourage these people to take this next step. I am also interested in increasing the satisfaction of volunteers, in general.

My interest in studying the effects of technology on social life started during my studies as an international student in the U.S. between 1999-2003. It was the time when Internet and email were becoming to be widely used worldwide. And as a person away from my culture and family and friends, I benefited greatly from these tools to keep in touch with all those things I had left behind. This personal experience gave rise to my dissertation, which combined my two interests, technology and culture, and I investigated how use of CMC influenced the acculturation process of temporarily migrating groups (e.g. international students).

I am mostly interested in finding out how technology – which is already a big part of our everyday lives - can be used for the betterment of our lives. As part of this concern, I have also been conducting studies on video games (SimCity) and the social media (Facebook and Twitter).

Recently, I became part of a large consortium with scholars from 10 countries, conducting a large cross-cultural study investigating the “cultural pathways to self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship”. http://cupesse.eu.

As an international scholar, with a mainstream education in social psychology, I see culture as an inseparable part of our lives and my research. As a methodology, I value field experiments and large-scale surveys as much as experiments in the lab.

Cemalcilar, Z. (2010). Schools as socialization contexts: Understanding the impact of school climate factors on students’ sense of school belonging. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 59(2), 243-272.

Cemalcilar, Z., & Goksen, F. (2014). Inequality in social capital: social capital, social risk and drop-out in the Turkish education system. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 35 (1), 94-114. DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2012.740807

Goksen, F., & Cemalcilar, Z. (2010). Migration as a cause of early drop-out from compulsory education: Implications for community action. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 34(2), 163-175.

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